Welcome CU Boulder Class of 2024 to the Health Society and Wellness in COVID 19 Times course. I'm Daryl Maeda. I'm Associate Dean for Student Success in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies. I'm Sona Demidjian, the director of the Renee Crown Wellness Institute and a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Welcoming you, we wanted to share some information about the history, intent, and structure of this class on behalf of the many people who designed and are offering it. As you start this class, we want you to know, most importantly that we care about you and your learning. We understand that this is not the start to college that you imagined as you wrote college essays and submitted applications last fall. You have faced difficult decisions about whether to start this semester in person or remotely, or even at all. As you listened to us right now, you're adjusting to moving into a dorm or just starting college from home. You are likely experiencing a mixture of emotions, uncertainty, stress, frustration, worry, as well as eagerness, enthusiasm, and excitement. It's a lot. We wish that we had the power to give you the start to college that you imagined. This wish has led us to innovating ways to make your college learning experiences rich and meaningful. This summer, we designed a course that would respond to you in your lives right now in this unusual time and circumstance. We built this course to be relevant to your everyday lives and to invite you to think creatively and critically about the challenges that we face here at CU, around our country, and around our world. You are an essential part of solving these challenges and building a new future. You deserve the support and guidance to meet these challenges. This class was built by a team of faculty and staff from all different parts of the university. You can read about the people who contributed to the design of the course in the resources section in the first unit. It's important for us to know that we designed this course to be centered on you. To do that, our team included CU students, even some of your fellow first-year classmates, along with returning students, and recently graduated students. This team use their experience in Boulder County and at CU Boulder to make this course relevant to you. Our student design team focused on questions about health and society that guided the course schedule. Once we identified topics, we then found great CU faculty experts to help us explore them and where possible to get answers. Over 30 faculty members enthusiastically accepted the call to contribute roughly 15 minute lectures, each addressing a topic or question raised by our student team. Our colleagues are so excited to share their expertise with you, to introduce you to their fields of study through the lens of these COVID-19 times, and to be part of your first semester of college. In your coming years at CU, you will come to know these professors and make contributions of your own in your academic programs. The design team of students also identified wellness tools useful for supporting your personal wellness and also our community wellness. Some of these are relevant to the transition to college in general, and others are specific to these COVID-19 times. Each unit will help you to recognize how wellness is a complex matter and with that, each unit also offers a wellness toolkit with practices based in science and scholarship for you to try out every week. We were also guided by a commitment to enhance your learning, not add more stress. That is why the course is synchronous, which means you can do the course in locations and at times that work for you. Each week, you'll find a new unit posted in Canvas. You can go at your own pace, listening to lectures and exploring the wellness toolkit activities. But we do recommend that you complete each unit in the week it is released before going on to the next. In real terms, you should plan to set aside up to three hours per week for this course to watch lecture videos, respond to reflection questions, engage in lecture content review, and practice your choice of the wellness tools for each unit. Recommended readings and other resources are posted within each unit and we do hope that you'll be inspired to explore these, but you are not required to do so. The class will be graded as pass-fail. If you complete 12 of the 14 units, you will pass the course. You will also have a chance to do an extra credit assignment that's described in your syllabus. Although this class is asynchronous and self-paced, that does not mean that you are alone. We encourage you to discuss each of the units with your new classmates. We will also be sharing themes with some of these units with other professors to help them and you make connections to your other classes where they're relevant. In order to help you get answers to your questions on course materials, we will have a section of each unit in Canvas where you can post questions about what you are learning. We want to add just one more thing in closing. In taking this class, give yourself permission not to know. Not knowing means keeping an open mind and staying curious. This class includes so many faculty perspectives in part because understanding the COVID-19 pandemic and the context of systemic racism and inequality requires many different kinds of knowledge and ways of answering questions. Studying was literally 30 different faculty members and more also means you will be able to explore as a first-year student, many areas of study that you might not otherwise have experienced. There's so much pressure when you start college to appear as though you have it all under control. It's great if you're super confident in your decisions and your choice of major. It's also equally great if you truly have no idea what you want to study here. In this class, you'll get to try on many areas of study and you can change your mind as often as you like. Notice what interests you, what inspires you, what captivates your attention. Use what you learn in fields you might not go on to study to expand your view of the things that become a focus of your academic journey. One of my favorite authors, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, "There are years that ask questions and years that answer." We encourage you to use this as the semester for asking questions. It's okay not to know. As people who have been asking questions and more questions and more questions across our entire careers, I think it is actually the not knowing that is one of the most exciting parts of being a researcher, a professor, and a member of this CU Boulder community. We invite you to join us and our colleagues in this course and embrace that not knowing. Embrace discovery and curiosity and pay attention to what inspires you, what you love. With that awareness, the sky's the limit. We are so looking forward to seeing what happens as you learn and apply what you learn in this class to support your academic journey and your health and wellness, and to support your community and our community here at CU Boulder and beyond.
